Guitarist Chris Michie didn't believe he was dying from the cancer. But he was tired of making dumb commercials. He told his wife he was retiring.

Before he stopped working altogether, though, he accepted one last job --

doing a soundtrack for a filmmaker he met at a friend's birthday party. The film was about a character who tended a flock of wild parrots on Telegraph Hill.

Chris, who died from melanoma at age 55 in March 2003, lived long enough to see a near-finished version of the movie, but he did not live to see the unlikely, runaway success of the film, "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," which is still playing in San Francisco theaters 16 months after it first opened. The companion book, in its fourth printing, is still riding the New York Times best-seller list. The movie is dedicated to him, something else he didn't live to see.

"That's the hardest thing," said his widow, Deborah, 59. "He isn't here to see the success of the movie."

Chris nearly completed his work on the movie -- there were a couple of small cues he was too tired to finish -- but the job of assembling the soundtrack album fell to his wife of 34 years, an interior decorator who had decorated George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. She had no previous experience in the record business.

"I knew it was something I had to do," she said, sitting in the sunny, cozy Fairfax living room the couple shared for 25 years. A poster-size photo of Chris, hung on a staircase, overlooks the room.

"It ripped my heart out. I have not been able as yet to listen to him singing. It's enough to hear his fingers on the strings. I am working up to it. "

"She actually couldn't listen to his music for a long time," said film director Judy Irving. "I think doing the soundtrack album helped her because there was a deadline."

Chris came to the Bay Area in 1969 from Madison, Wis., with a band called Mendelbaum that also included future Doobie Brothers drummer Keith Knudsen. Chris was one of the Bay Area's top freelance guitarists -- working for Boz Scaggs, Maria Muldaur, Jerry Garcia and others -- when he answered a last- minute call in 1981 for a Van Morrison session. He put the lead guitar on the track "Cleaning Windows" -- the rhythm part had been previously played by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits -- and spent the next four years touring and recording with Morrison.

Irving and the subject of her documentary, Mark Bittner, attended a party in Berkeley for an old college friend when they first met Chris. Bittner, an enthusiastic Morrison fan and guitarist himself, recognized him. Irving, who was editing her film and planning to use several Morrison songs on the soundtrack, asked Chris if he could help her obtain clearances to use the recordings. Chris, instead, suggested he supply original music and Irving gladly accepted.

The guitarist was first diagnosed with melanoma in July 1997 and had beaten the cancer into remission twice. "When he started to work on the movie, he felt good," said Deborah.

Irving never knew he was ill. She held a screening at Industrial Light & Magic, a fund-raiser to pay Chris. It turned out he only had a few weeks to live. "He came to the screening," said Irving. "He was undergoing chemo, so he was wearing a hat. But he made it."

"I noticed his hands were shaking," said Bittner. "I listened to the music and I would hear his hands shaking. It doesn't disturb the music. It makes it even more poignant because you can hear him struggling to make the music."

His wife said he never believed the cancer would kill him until the last few weeks, although she also said he realized the soundtrack would be his final work.

"He absolutely knew it," she said. "I think so. He never said so, but he talked about how he was going to retire and said at least he was going out on a high note. He never gave up the idea he was going to live until the last two weeks."

She mentioned one segment in the movie where Bittner cites Buddhist philosophy discussing the death of one of his birds, talking about water going over a waterfall and how it regains the river. "I cannot imagine Chris watching that, fighting the battle he was fighting," his wife said.

Chris had already watched his closest musical collaborator and business partner of more than 20 years die of cancer. He and Andy Kulberg formed a wide- ranging musical production company that had produced New Age instrumental albums by Daniel Kobialka, principal violinist of the San Francisco Symphony, and advertising jingles such as their "If you can't make it, Swanson's can" campaign. The Michies bought their home on the shady Fairfax lane in part because Kulberg lived around the corner. Kulberg succumbed to a rare blood cancer a year before Chris died.

"They both had cancer together," said Deborah. "There was discussion about who was going to take care of the widow."

Chris was well qualified for the soundtrack since he wrote and recorded guitar instrumentals for years. His 1993 album "Guitars and Oranges"was a collection of his instrumentals; a number of pieces on the film's soundtrack come from a 2000 collection of instrumentals he recorded to mark the opening of a golf course in Eemnes, Holland, called "Goyer Golf Suite." He specialized in clean, precise tones that illuminate the crystalline, sometimes ethereal compositions on the soundtrack.

Chris wrote about first discovering he had cancer in a privately published 2000 memoir, "Name Droppings." "It completely changed my outlook on life and opinions about people," he wrote. "It took awhile because after a cancer scare it's inevitable that one lives in fear of it returning, but eventually I began to see things in such a different light that it began to affect my relationships."

The Michies' daughter, Claire, 24, moved to New York City last fall, leaving her mother home alone except for a 17-year-old cat named Rander. Deborah continues to work as an interior decorator in a small shed office built in the front yard by her husband. "The third year is the hardest," she said with a sigh. "The first year you're just numb. I miss him every hour of the day, every day. It just doesn't seem real that he's dead."